There aren’t enough cadavers to teach medical students. Surgical Science wants to help

Tom Englund, the CEO of Sweden-based surgical simulation company Surgical Science, compares operating on a human body to flying a plane: You want the person in charge to have practiced the procedure many times so that there’s no learning on the job.

That’s one of the benefits, he said in an interview, of Surgical Science’s products. The medical simulation technology and software allow doctors and medical providers to train as many times as needed in a specific technique, rather than have their lesson cut short by a cadaver’s limited window of utility.

“You can only use a body like three times, and there’s a big cost associated. You have to keep it in the cooling room,” Englund told Morning Brew. “Many of the skills need repetitive usage, so you would want the student to practice over and over again.”

And it’s not just about how many times a cadaver can be operated on—there’s also a growing training gap in healthcare today. Technology is advancing faster than training is for new techniques, and Englund said Surgical Science aims to “bridge this gap.”

“The entire field of medical education is moving more to modern technologies and novel ways of doing things,” Englund said. “And that’s where simulation comes in, because simulation gives you a safe and efficient tool to use in order to gain the necessary proficiency for medical professionals.”

Surgical Science makes technology that simulates providing medical care with one’s hands and using a robot to perform surgery. Morning Brew was able to test out its RobotiX Express, through which medical professionals can learn how to operate on a human via a robot.

The user leans their head to see the simulation on a lens and puts their hands in controllers similar to those used to perform robotic surgery. The simulation, and the user’s progress, can be seen on a larger screen connected to the workstation. The RobotiX Express has multiple training levels, from simple coordination exercises with the simulated robot arms to lifelike, interactive interfaces that look and react how the human body would. And the equipment is no joke—this reporter wasn’t able to make it past the second training module in which the user taps various buttons with robot arms.

The equipment is portable, which is a huge component of the company’s mission to bridge the training gap through “scalable and accessible” equipment, Kathryn Jenner, the company’s senior director of product management, told Morning Brew.

“Instead of [training equipment] being big systems that are incredibly expensive, we can make them smaller, more portable, and more affordable,” she said.